Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. Going to London and now a smaller city in Germany was like a breath of fresh air. Startups grow "organically", as in without the government machinery shoved up their arse, people are freer to pursue whatever interests them, and since you can actually see the good and the bad in the city, you actually feel that the city is a living entity. Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.
Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is - one can clearly notice the wannabeism.
Last time I went to Singapore I was struck by how it was impossible to buy any local music. I associate by music, so I always buy local music when I travel. But in Singapore's tiny music stores, I couldn't even find a Dick Lee CD for sale, and his music wasn't available through Australian iTunes.
(In the end I emailed his website asking which stores to try, and instead they sent one of his personal assistants to my Singapore hotel in person to hand deliver one of their remaining CD copies. For which my family were deeply grateful, we had discovered him 25 years earlier on a cassette we bought of The Mad Chinaman, and as a little Aussie kid I'd learned all the words of Rasa Sayang: "Everything we have has to be the best of the fabulous east and the wonderful west".)
Lately I've started to find Singaporean bands on Bandcamp, so things are improving. But it wasn't like I could walk into Starbucks and find CDs from a bunch of emerging local artists at the counter. I'm heartbroken that the 100th Starbucks store near The Fullerton Waterboat House has apparently closed too.
Despite throwing money at tech salaries are still poor. Everybody gets that money except the developers.
Tech salaries are not poor if you compare them to other South East Asia countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc). If you compare them to other professions in Singapore... then I can't say (I don't know).
Edit:- to counter your example, devs are not as highly paid for the living costs of Singapore. And they don't even form part of the upper bracket, which is largely populated by people in finance and management.
That's just Asia. I don't think a developer is considered "high status" anywhere in Asia.
Singaporean here. The central touristy area is artificial, but the public housing areas surrounding it are slightly more organic — with a fair share of homeless people who sleep on benches at night, too.
And of course, for an actual taste of SG culture, one has to visit the hawker centres and the HDBs to actually get a feel of the city's life. But they seem so staid and artificial still, almost Soviet-esque, compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Even if I take a locality in Dubai (the other culprit here), the Dubai Marina is still vastly more lively than MBS, and the less fancier residential colonies in Old Dubai are still more lively than the average HDB complex. Shenton Way turns into practically a ghost town on weekends in comparison to its counterparts elsewhere.
And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
I'd suggest that it's because the "happy path" for most residents in Singapore is ridiculously straightforward to navigate, so people don't need to be resourceful to accomplish things.
As a Singaporean, I've travelled to Vietnam multiple times, and have worked with Vietnamese on projects before. The Vietnamese usually get my admiration for being highly resourceful and entrepreneurial. They're really good at hustling and improvising.
Lots of working-class Singaporeans aren't raised like that, because the first 18 to 20 years of their lives have been laid out for them.
>And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
I know some mainland Chinese who live in Singapore, and they often complain about how closed-minded the locals are. If Vietnam is similar to China in that regard, then it might well be less hierarchical than Singapore (Chinese culture seems much less hierarchical than some other Confucian-influenced cultures like Japan/Korea, maybe due to the communist revolution actively demonising Confucious, and Vietnam also had a similar revolution).
And it has majority of its population living in small towns, and villages, some of which don't even have a single cellphone tower.
PAP itself started as a largely communist party. The later confrontation can be largely seen as two communist parties vying for power. And the Western styled communist party (PAP) has won.
On Winsemius, in its early history, Singapore was indeed using a cargo cult mass industrialisation, and it of course was only half successful.
A much less "genius" idea of turning the country into an offshore finance centre was what made it, and it was not his idea.
It was Lee junior, who spent his youth in London, who brought it.
* The proximity of power to population because it is a tiny city state. Singaporean governance is under extreme pressure to be effective because if it fails it cannot hide. This is a systemic issue that can be seen all around the world and is probably why some countries moved their capitals AWAY from population centres (e.g. brazil, myanmar): https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8830780/Campante...
* The reaction to the communists. Lee Kuan Yew didn't just annihilate the communists with coldstore, he tried to replicate their policies to maintain his stranglehold on power (note the resemblance of HDBs to soviet style housing, for instance). In a way, his lack of any real conviction and ruthless pragmatism helped here. This was echoed later when an opposition party set up on a platform of smaller class sizes. PAP effectively strangled the party (largely through unethical means) but then recognized the power of the protests that led to this party's popularity and took their policy (ceding no credit of course!).
* Lee's economic policies were, while good, largely not his idea. He had the good sense to follow this guy's proscriptions though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Winsemius
I lived in Singapore for 3 years. While I acknowledge its success at industrializing, I hated working there. The authoritarianism and rigid class structure permeates every aspect of life. This also made it a really bad environment for tech to flourish IMHO, even though they threw money at it. Creativity is massively stifled. Cargo cultism of silicon valley was rife. Most tech startups and founder I encountered were fast followers and largely treated developers like cogs.